His contract was about to run out, and they just decided not to renew it. He claims he was not at fault!
If "saving the earth" is so important, the onus is on the Greens to come up with a solution creative enough to preserve industry as it preserves the environment.
Now that, I agree with. But I would submit that if coal goes away, we’re going to have to replace the power it generated from somewhere, and that somewhere is going to need workers to build and service the equipment whether it’s hydro, wind, solar, or something more exotic.
In fact it’s likely we’ll need more workers for such industries because, at least thus far, we do not get the energy return from environmentally-friendly energy sources that we do from the sources that are causing an environmental disaster, which means we need more of them to make up the difference.
Especially as ICE cars are replaced by electric cars which need to suck down some serious power overnight so you can drive them in the morning, our power requirements moving forward are only going to go up. Green energy is a potential boomtown that will put the Texas oilfields of yesteryear to shame.
In other words, few are angry that buggy manufacturers ended up getting replaced by car manufacturers. Yes, jobs were lost, but many more jobs were gained. Instead of a 3-man shop that hand builds buggies and rarely if ever innovates you have tens of thousands of people designing and building cars under one umbrella, undergoing constant innovation that keeps people constantly employed, and that’s just with one company.
Hydrocarbon energy extraction is by definition a dying industry because we are pulling the hydrocarbons out of the ground faster than they are being replaced. Even if we decide to be shortsighted enough to keep burning hydrocarbons without caring about what it does to the environment, eventually they will run out.
And then we will not have a choice of whether or not to burn them, and not only will the coal miners and oil rig workers lose their jobs, but so will almost everyone else and the world will be plunged into an economic disaster that makes the Great Depression look like losing a penny behind the couch.
I am not an advocate of energy conservation - I am an advocate of coming up with better energy generation methods that have less, if not zero, impact on the environment and do not require literally setting fire to limited resources. If as you say we would engineer our way out of this problem, then energy conservation would not be necessary because we would have more of it than we knew what to do with and would not be creating secondary problems as a result of its generation.
" I am an advocate of coming up with better energy generation methods that have less, if not zero, impact on the environment"
Name one.
Solar - thousands of acres of wilderness covered in panels, or mirror plants that incinerate unlucky birds that pass by. No power at night, so gas/nuclear/coal needed
Wind - Thousands of protected raptors killed every year, unreliable, minimum output at peak need (summer are pretty calm in the plains).
Biofuels - huge waste associated with corn, biodiesel mandates resulted in the destruction of large areas of rain forests in Indonesia to grow oil palms, sugar cane plantations replace forests elsewhere.
Solar - thousands of acres of wilderness covered in panels, or mirror plants that incinerate unlucky birds that pass by. No power at night, so gas/nuclear/coal needed
Who says you need solar farms? The BEST and cheapest solution is for individuals to own solar panels…or to lease their roof to Solar companies for a reduced rate (20% or higher).
Solar will NOT deliver all our power needs…but if just half the homes in the US had solar panels…we could shut down about 10-20 percent of our fossil burning power plants.
“Who says you need solar farms?”
Indeed!
In my neck of the woods, PSE&G has installed a solar panel on each and every utility pole, and that is actually a lot of panels–in addition to the solar farms that they and some big corporations maintain.
You’re right, panels on homes/businesses don’t cause those problems. But to get a major impact on total energy use, the large solar farms would be needed.
IF…
They’d install solar panels on every roof ever built on every building…
The emissions trick did, indeed increase NOX emissions specifically to DEcrease CO2 emissions. I.e. improve mileage. The exact same reason they did it in the EU, too. CO2 emissions are regulated in the EU while they are not directly regulated in the US. They are indirectly regulated by CAFE standard. Yes NOX emissions in the EU are allowed to be 3-4 times the US as are particulate emissions (soot). That soot is causing a huge problem in European cities with a gray pallor that has permeated every Euro city over the last 30 years.
The software trick is easy. The EPA test is on dyno rollers. To keep the traction and stability controls from going ape-diddly when driving 2 wheels rolling and 2 wheels stationary, the car goes into a “test mode” and uses the compliant map instead of the non-compliant map. Not rocket science and VW is not alone per this report;
You're right, panels on homes/businesses don't cause those problems. But to get a major impact on total energy use, the large solar farms would be needed.
Having solar on roofs and buildings would have a MAJOR impact. The problem/advantage is…the utility companies wouldn’t benefit from it - which is fine with me.
There is no ONE solution. There can be multiple solutions. Wind farms, solar panels on homes…solar farms…wave generators…hydrogen generators.
Right now solar supplies 0.4 % of US electricity. Multiply that by 10, we’d be at 4%. Wind is already at 4.4% (not that I’m a big wind fan). See what I did there??
Name one.
Note that I said “coming up with,” not “using currently-existing.” Yes, solar reflectors torch birds. That’s an unintended outcome of the design. Engineers are already working on figuring out how to safeguard birds from the design. If it turns out that it’s not possible to safeguard birds effectively, then I would not advocate for focused mirror solar collection. As others have noted, rooftop solar panels cause none of these problems, and even with current technology it is easy to power an entire house with solar energy collected from panels on the roof. I personally know a guy who powers his house, including charging his Tesla, with his solar collectors and in fact still has power left over that gets dumped into the grid - the power company sends him a check each month.
Wind turbines: This seems to be overblown. Everything we erect kills birds. From buildings to radio towers to, yes, wind turbines. This study shows that somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 birds are killed each year by wind turbines. Similar death estimates involving outdoor cats put the bird kill count in the billions. In short, 300,000 birds sounds like a lot, but it’s chump change next to the death toll from other human activities.
That said, there is very probably an engineering solution that would reduce or eliminate bird fatalities from wind turbines. Off the top of my head, the new axial wind turbines (which rotate about the pole rather than at a 90 degree angle to the pole) are more compact, and it would be much more feasible to put a screen guard around the blades to stop birds from running into them, not to mention the idea that since the blades are no longer 60 feet out from the hub, the bird will see the pole and not fly into it in the first place.
etc, etc. In short, the problems that crop up with alternative energy are engineering-related, and are not, I suspect, insurmountable.
Right now solar supplies 0.4 % of US electricity. Multiply that by 10, we'd be at 4%. Wind is already at 4.4% (not that I'm a big wind fan). See what I did there??
The payback for wind power is still greater for large corporations then solar is. Solar panels still need to get a lot cheaper (which they are). They’ve more then doubled efficiency and prices have dropped more then half in just 10 years. New technology could make it very very viable. The potential is there for solar and wind to generate ALL US power needs. But not in my lifetime.
Well personally I’m not there yet. A couple in town just spent about $25,000 putting solar panels all over their roof. They figured with all of the government incentives thrown in, they break even in maybe 10-15 years. I’m not sure what the life expectancy is on the panels but it wouldn’t surprise me if they needed replacement due to damage or obsolescence in 20 years. Plus I like not having to mess with one more mechanical system in my house.
Farmers love the wind turbines because they get paid for the land they sit on. The units by our cabin cost upwards of $900,000 and are off half the time due to maintenance or wind conditions. I’m not sure what the BE point is on them but the power company would never do it unless they were forced to. Their are cheaper ways to deliver power. Plus, having just driven through that wind farm on I65 in Indiana, those things are an environmental eyesore as well as bird and airplane catchers.
A couple in town just spent about $25,000 putting solar panels all over their roof. They figured with all of the government incentives thrown in, they break even in maybe 10-15 years
$25k…that must be a huge house…and I take it your state doesn’t offer any incentives.
Some states like MA have incentives above and beyond the Fed…this brings the cost down significantly (under $10k).
The other option is to have a company like Solar City install them for FREE. They sell the electricity and give you a guaranteed discount of at least 20%.
It might cost VW about $100 to install a urea system. For 11 million cars, that works out to an up front cost of $1.1 billion. Add to that the cost of the urea, maybe another $50 per car over its lifetime, or $550 million. Add a fine of maybe a billion, and that’s a huge loss. Paying off a class action suit to cover the loss in fuel economy if emissions can be brought in line without hardware, it might well be cheaper than adding a urea system. I’m sure VW is estimating the costs of these an other solutions right now, even if it is nearly midnight at HQ now.
“It might cost VW about $100 to install a urea system” That seems awfully low to me, if thats all it cost one would think they would have installed them in the first place.
Yeah, given that it probably costs $300 to replace a busted window washer tank, I’m betting more like $1,000 to design, distribute, and retrofit a urea system on each car that didn’t have it to begin with.
Well I didn’t know what all the talk of urea systems was for diesels (mine was from the 80’s) so I looked it up. Holy cow, a separate tank for urea? In an MB that’s 8 gallons at $32 per every 12,000 miles. That amounts to another two cents per mile just for urea. Another blow to diesels but now I understand what the truckers are doing carrying that heavy tank of blue stuff.
The cost will be amortized over 11million licensed cars, all the unsold ones, and all the diesels yet to be built. The design cost should not amount to much per car. The $100 each is a WAG as all our guesses are,and I was thinking that since VW sets the rates for the recall retrofit, they will apply as little labor as possible. And of course it could be more.
If the urea system has to be added I can see costs exceeding $1000 per car easily. The cost of the tank, plumbing, wiring, exhaust components and software upgrades will add up quick. The labor will also be a few hours. It will very interesting to see what vw comes up with for a fix.